Comments on: Seamount Life Is Unique Just Not In the Way We Thought

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:30:04 +0000

The shrimp we saw on GoASEx Seamounts were Heptacarpus sp., abundant on the seafloor, sponges, and bubblegum corals ~700-800m. The most amazing thing to me is the shrimp eyes glow in the lights of the submersible, so you could perhaps estimate abundance if you wanted to.

By: Dr. M

Dr. M — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 03:18:40 +0000

Johann,
No not always. We’ve seen them on rocks, corals, and of course sponges. However, although I have no quantitative data to support this, their presence on sponges always seems to be a ‘sure bet’.

By: Johann

Johann — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 02:16:00 +0000

Are the shrimp always on the sponge, like some on coral reefs?

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 02:13:17 +0000

Ooops, sorry bout that!
Look forward to seeing it!
I’m hoping to see stuff on the Corner Rise Seamounts coming out too, Dr. Shank has presented preliminary/summary stuff in a talk, but I don’t know of any papers.

By: Dr. M

Dr. M — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:01:27 +0000

I should have a paper out this year addressing depth and community structure on seamounts.

Romunov, thanks for the info on the Slovene origins of the acronym

By: Deep Sea Fishing Impacts Sea Mounts » Eclectic Echoes

Deep Sea Fishing Impacts Sea Mounts » Eclectic Echoes — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:03:29 +0000

[...] McClain over at Deep Sea News recently published a very readable open access paper at PLoS ONE about the potential connectedness [...]

By: Peter Etnoyer

Peter Etnoyer — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 20:27:59 +0000

your browser’s fine, the first link was indeed broken

By: romunov

romunov — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:46:38 +0000

The first link works for me now. I sure hope you changed something, or else my Foxy is acting up… again.

I must say, your acronym for the hypothesis is pretty funny, possibly because the acronym is a word in Slovene and means “laughter”.

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:20:47 +0000

I love that you guys put this out on PLoS ONE, I have no end to frustration when I can’t access half the papers of my Professors eventhe recent ones.

This paper really does cut a leg off the support of SMEH, doesn’t it? I seem to recall some relatively similar results for the New England Seamounts which of course are in a totally different oceanographic scenario.

Did you do any evaluations of communities based on depth and microhabitat type?

By: Dr. M

Dr. M — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:10:23 +0000

I believe the presence of shared species implies connectedness, although the intensity and timescale of this connection remains an avenue for future research.

All the links appear to be working. All the links will lead a reader to discussion of the paper (or the paper itself) that reveals the findings of the paper. The title is what some refer to as a teaser.